"The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to -271.3°C, not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it." -Stephen Hawking
One of the most powerful predictions of the Big Bang -- the fact that our cold, star-and-galaxy-rich, slowly-expanding Universe came from a hot, dense, much more homogeneous state -- was the existence of a bath of leftover radiation that should be detectable, even today.
Image credit: Pearson / Addison Wesley, retrieved from Jill Bechtold.
Back when the…

"Much later, when I discussed the problem with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life. But this “blunder,” rejected by Einstein, is still sometimes used by cosmologists even today, and the cosmological constant denoted by the Greek letter Λ rears its ugly head again and again and again." -George Gamow, the father of the Big Bang model
The Big Bang -- the prediction that the Universe started from a hot, dense, rapidly expanding state -- tells us where our cold, star-and-galaxy-rich, slowly expanding Universe full of…

"Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view." -Max Planck
Tomorrow morning, at 8 AM my time, the press conference that cosmologists have spent the past decade waiting for will finally happen, and the Planck satellite -- the most powerful satellite ever to measure the leftover radiation from the Big Bang -- will finally unveil its results about the origin and composition of the Universe.
Image credit: ESA / LFI and HFI Consortia.
They've figured out how to subtract the…

"The colors of a rainbow so pretty in the sky.
Are also on the faces of people going by." -Louis Armstrong
It's no secret that white light is the light that we see when all the colors shine together and are seen at once. This has been known for over 400 years, when Isaac Newton demonstrated that white light could be broken up into all the known colors by dispersing it through a prism.
Image credit: Adam Hart-Davis.
All that we're doing is breaking white light -- in this case, sunlight -- up into all of its component colors. This can be done artificially (such as by configuring a prism) or…

The verdict is out, the 2010 Senior Review Committee recommendation on the NASA Astrophysics old active missions; who will keep going, and who is recommended to get the chop.
It is an interesting list, with some interesting recommendations.
And the winners are...:
1. Planck - level funding for 30 months, per request, consider 42 month extension later
2. Chandra - extend to 2012 and beyond, restore and augment funding, consider automated operation, concern about spacecraft degradation
3. Warm Spitzer - surprise winner! recommend $7M augmentation for 2012 and 2013, note spacecraft ends…

Some of you who've been following astronomy for awhile might remember this report, where a group of astronomers reported finding a giant "void" in the Universe.
What is a void? Well, galaxies are distributed pretty randomly, but because of gravity, they cluster together. A small example is our local group which looks like this,
and a larger example is the Virgo cluster, which is about 1,000 times as massive as our local group, and looks like this:
Well, a void is the opposite of a cluster, where you have a large volume of space that's simply empty of galaxies and matter. This press release…

Nothing gets past you, does it? A scientific paper came out earlier this week, and I took a look at it, sighed, and Jamie asked me, "What?" And I said to her, "When I see bad science, it just makes me a little bit frustrated and sad." Of course, I had no intention to write about it.
But then Starts With A Bang reader Matt emailed me, and writes the following about this press release that he had seen:
You have two explanations for these gravitational waves now and that much I understand. But they make it sound as if symmetry breaking and inflation are competing theories. They aren't, right? Do…

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